Beautiful Beekeeping, English Cottage Gardening, and Cooking with Honey

Tag Archives: Bee

For the last eight months my bees have been left to their own bee-ish devices. I’ve been too busy with Culinary School and professional cooking to mess with them. I’m delighted they’ve been thriving despite my benign neglect. I guess this happens when one lets one’s bees be bees…

A few years back when I was busy preparing for a big trial, my inattention resulted in the growth and development of what I fondly refer to as my “Mean Bee Hive”. It’s the biggest, healthiest, and most productive hive I have! (Yes, they are a little defensive….)

The Mean Bee Hive

I still avoid messing with my Mean Bees. I have no idea what’s going on in their lower deep, and I don’t want to know. I suspect it’s some type of mystical and magical bee alchemy I wouldn’t understand. I’m happy if they’re happy.

Notwithstanding the above, late winter/early spring is a precarious time for bees. I’m going to make some Bee Fondant (Yes, that kind of Fondant!) tonight or tomorrow.

But here are a few pictures I took yesterday. I wish these pictures showed how active my bees actually were!

Obviously, there is much cleaning and gardening to be done to pretty up the Apiary. But right now, I’m delighted that everyone is surviving the winter!

The Most Rev Justin Welby has disclosed how he would talk to the bees about his innermost secrets growing up, as the bees “were reasonably confidential”

The Prince of Wales once told how he liked to unburden himself to his plants. Now, the Archbishop of Canterbury has disclosed that he too, is not averse to conversing with nature.

In the case of the Most Rev Justin Welby, though, it was not flowers and shrubs, but bees in whom he would confide his innermost secrets.

The cleric has told how he became interested in beekeeping as a child through his grandmother, and would use the time when he was tending to their hives to talk to them.

He added that he started off by telling them about his day at school, but that as he grew older, he moved on to more mature preoccupations – the birds and the bees.

Interviewed as part of a new BBC programme, The Wonder of Bees, he said he used to talk about the “pretty girls” he had encountered, adding: “The bees knew more than anyone else.”

The Archbishop said his grandmother had introduced him to Rudyard Kipling’s encouragement to “tell bees the news”, from his poem, The Bee-Boy’s Song, and had embraced it.

“I assume they were reasonably confidential,” he added.

The Archbishop will appear in the second of four programmes presented by Martha Kearney as part of her new series beginning tomorrow . In it, the broadcaster will explore the science and history of beekeeping.

At one point, she will visit Lambeth Palace, which is currently home to six beehives, to the “delight” of its incumbent. In the programme, due to be broadcast on BBC Four on April 21, the Archbishop said: “My grandmother took to keeping bees and grew up with the information from the beekeepers that you must always tell the bees all the news.

“It’s in Kipling. So we had to tell them, she took me down and I’d say how school had been and what I was doing.

“And then as I grew up and, ‘I got a boat’, and ‘there’s this pretty girl here’ and that sort of stuff.”

When asked by Kearney whether the bees knew “all his secrets first”, he added: “The bees knew more than anybody else. I assume they were reasonably confidential.”

He also discussed the significance of bees in Christian thinking, where hives are used in religious art to symbolise people living harmoniously together in a monastery.

“Clearly the people who picked up on those had never lived in a monastery,” he said.

“Religious community life was, and to this day remains, not always that easy but then I suppose hives aren’t always as harmonious as we like to imagine.”

Reflecting on the symbolic use of bees in religion, he went on: “The ancient legend was that they were the only creature to escape untainted from the Garden of Eden so they were particularly innocent.

“The great preachers in the era of the eastern Roman Empire, Constantinople, would be referred to as ’honey tongued preachers’ and it was a sense of smooth and sweet and with words that carried real conviction and power and life changing impact.”

The remainder of the Wonder of Bees series will see Kearney working on her own beehives, in the hopes of producing honey to sell.

Programmes will also see her try to combat disease in the hive, visit scientists putting bees in tiny ’straitjackets’ to demonstrate the damaging effect of chemicals and filming the “waggle dance” that helps the insects communicate.

The Wonder of Bees is part of BBC Four’s spring season, intended to explore the nation’s “deep relationship with nature and our inimitable love of gardens”.

STEP 3

Spread batter in pan. Bake until golden and a toothpick comes out clean, about 35 minutes. Remove from oven; poke holes with toothpick all over cake. Remove zest strips and sage from first glaze; brush over top. Let cool completely in pan.

STEP 4

Final glaze: Whisk together honey, confectioners’ sugar, and lemon juice. Remove cake from pan and brush final glaze over top; continue until all is used. Garnish with sugared sage. Cut into wedges with a serrated knife, wiping knife between cuts; serve.

Thanks to the Polar Vortex it’s been abnormally arctic in Southwestern Ohio this year. We aren’t used to this kind of heavy snow, ice and below zero temperatures.

Local beekeepers are understandably anxious. Are their hives still alive? Will the bees make it until the dandelions start blooming? Should they have winterized more? Or in my case, winterized at all?

I went into December with two healthy hives. I started the season with four.

One of my hives never really got going, and the other was robbed by its next door neighbor. Needless to say, I’ll be moving those hives farther apart this year!

Over the past few days we’ve finally gotten some blessedly warm weather. Last Friday it hit 59 degrees, and with great trepidation, I ventured out to my backyard (aka Mt. Everest) to survey the bee situation. I was delighted to discover that both hives appear to be thriving!

I didn’t harvest any honey last Fall, so I’m pretty sure the bees have enough food for now. Nonetheless I’m planning to open the hives up for few minutes today to do a quick check and and slip in some fondant.

It was too sunny to get good pictures, but if you look closely you can see my happy girls flying. Happy Bee Season!!